Home Made Wild Berry Jellies

Photo of recipe from book ‘Sweets Made Simple’ p.117 by Miss Hope & Mr Greenwood, Published 2014 by BBC Books an imprint of Ebury Publishing.

We’ve made a couple of sweets from this recipe book and they never fail to get excellent results. This particular recipe was probably one of the more simple from the book and is well worth trying if you’re feeling nervous about making sweets at home. The result is a chewy jelly sweet that tastes something like grown up Ribena.

Ingredients all assembled together…

Now the recipe recommends using a food processor to get the berries into a nice pulp, but we only own a hand held blender. The results look more disturbing, think awful horror film gore, but actually seem to have the right result.

Blending the mixed berries…

I’d never used Gelatine in cooking before so I was interested to see how the Gelatine responded to being soaked in water. The recipe didn’t state how long the sheets were to be soaked for so they sat in the cold water whilst I got the rest of the mix ready,

Leaf gelatine soaking.

Sieving the mixed berries…

So the next stage involved sieving the blended mixed berries into a metal pan. This bit took a great deal longer than I anticipated, and a very heavy handed stirring method! Anyway the result was a very smooth berry juice in the pan ready for me to add the sugar, glucose syrup, and Crème de Cassis.

Sugary, Berry Juice Mixture…

After remembering I needed to boil off the alcohol and letting the an cool a little I got to add the Gelatine leaves, which were fairly soft and squidgy at this point. I then transferred the mix to a cling film lined Pyrex dish (not what was recommended but a roughly similar size to the tin needed), and left to chill in the fridge overnight.

I decided to lift the block of solid Jelly out of the Pyrex container, to cut it into squares. A little bit risky, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to get the knife at the right angle for cutting otherwise!

The Jellies then needed to be tossed in a special mix of cornflour, sugar and icing sugar, I presume to help keep the jelly from melting or becoming a sticky mess.

Jellies coated in a confectioners sugar mix.

I then had a little bit of fun arranging the jellies in some pretty Jam Jars we’d saved. This stage was purely for my own amusement, and for the sweet pictures.

It’s probably worth mentioning that the longer the jellies were left out the more they seemed to leak pink goo. So as fun as it is to photograph them, I had to finish quickly and pop the jars in the fridge. These won’t last long!!